PHANTASMA: PHIDIAS GOLD

“People that have been in the neighborhood forever swear in the middle of summer they can still smell molasses,” Scott Chasse says, Community Arts Director at the Distillery Gallery.

The brick structure that settles silently into the industrial South Boston landscape dates back to the mid-1800s and is known to most for a famous molasses byproduct: rum.

“The water used to come right up to the back parking lot so boats could deliver molasses to the property,” Chasse continues. They keep a Felton’s New England rum bottle at the front desk, produced decades ago in this very building.

For their latest exhibition, opening tonight, The Distillery Gallery is looking to these roots. Their template: the rum bottle. Curated by branding duo, Phidias Gold, The Distillation Show invited 19 different artists, (three of whom live and work in the building) to turn the liquor cabinet staple into a work of art.

Participants use the bottles as mini canvases– Dana Woulfe’s bottle showcases a tiny paper target, a recurring motif in his work, visible just past a bold “TOO FACED” painted in block letters on the front. Kenji Nakayama dresses a bottle up in his famed pinstripe. Damion Silver takes his, etched and painted and builds a box around it with countless nails, evoking a tribal legend that says such a ritual is the only way to obtain what the heart ultimately desires.

Phidias Gold, almost a year old, is the brainchild of designers Wesley Eggebrecht and Alex Dakoulas who team with artists across the country to curate exhibitions like this one– they give the artist a format, then let them make it their own. In May they did it with paper toys.

Paper Toy Show from Phidias Gold on Vimeo.

They’re thinking about vinyl toys or skate decks for the future. But beyond the art shows, they’re looking to establish a sort of culture around art-inspired apparel which shows like this promote.

“It’s a clothing line and a brand made by artists, for artists,” says co-founder, Dakoulas, also behind clothing line Dance Party Massacre. “There are skate brands and snowboard brands, we want to make an art brand.”

He dreams of hard-at-work artists clad in their designs, often stamped with Phidias Gold himself– a rather demented looking rabbit with long teeth and hollowed out eyes, a figment of Eggebrecht’s imagination with a narrative plucked from ancient Greek mythology.

“In early Greece they didn’t consider art to be a skill,” Dakoulas says. “They considered it to be a trade. Their muses [they had nine of them] were like music and poetry, but they didn’t consider painting and visual art to be a muse.”

So the duo took it upon themselves to update history, establishing a tenth Greek muse: Phidias Gold, named for Phidias, the famed sculptor of Athena in the Parthenon and Zeus in Olympia who used the golden ratio to create near exact human proportion. (The ratio is now called “phi,” after his namesake.) And thus, Phidias Gold was born– the Greek muse of visual art.

Ultimately though, the shirts and the bottles and the creepy little rabbit are about creating an atmosphere and a brand that inspires others to create.

“We want to inspire people to make art and also present art that we really like,” Dakoulas says. “We’re hoping that when people see our brand or the name Phidias Gold they’ll think, ‘I should be making something.’”

Phidias Gold apparel will be for sale at the opening reception. Bottles are also available for purchase, prices range from $200 to $250.

[The Distillation Show Opening Reception. 12.2. 7-10 p.m. Runs through Dec. 29. The Distillery. 516 East 2nd Street., South Boston. gallery.distilleryboston.com]